The Medium

by Noëlle Sickels

  February 1941

  In the months that followed, Helen was repeatedly reminded of the children in the trench. The Life photo had been made into a poster supporting America’s providing armaments to the Allies. The enlarged photo, with the slogan “Help England—and it won’t happen here,” was posted in store windows, in the lobby of the movie house, and at the bus terminal. Helen kept her eyes averted whenever she passed one of the posters, but she couldn’t stop herself wondering if the two doomed children had died yet.

  Billy had taken a job at Wright Aeronautical in Paterson, but he still worked Saturdays at Benson’s. Mr. Mackey had come back from his trampings and gotten a job at the Wright plant, too. President Roosevelt said America should be “the arsenal for democracy,” and Helen supposed he was right, but she regretted that Billy’s work schedule meant he had less time to spend with her. Sundays were often taken up by his family. Mr. Mackey had embarked on a number of overdue repairs on the house, and he expected Billy and Lloyd to pitch in.

  “Do you think he’s changed?” Helen asked Billy some weeks after Mr. Mackey’s return. She’d noticed a wrung out quality to the man that she didn’t remember him having before. Even standing in the midst of his family or busily engaged in some task of carpentry or yard work, he had an air of solitariness and motionlessness.

  It was a clear Saturday night in February, and Helen and Billy were trudging home from sledding on steep Maitland Avenue. Rosie and her brothers had been there with their ten-person toboggan, and the snow on the backs of Helen’s and Billy’s coats attested to numerous hilarious spills.

  “I’m not sure,” Billy answered after some thought. “It’s different with him now, but I don’t know if it’s him or me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, he gives me my head most of the time. Lloyd, too. Which I think is ’cause we’re not kids like we were when he left. But he kind of stands off from all of us, doesn’t even shush Linda when she’s making a racket. He hasn’t looked at the model planes I made while he was gone, and when I told him about a great new fishing spot we could go next summer, he didn’t say anything.”

  “You sound disappointed.”

  Billy stopped walking and kicked at a snowbank, gradually boring a dent in the packed snow.

  “It’s funny, Helen, but I still miss him. He’s back home, and I still miss him.”

  “I guess you can get an idea in your head of somebody when the person isn’t around, and then, later, if they don’t match that idea, it can be sort of sad.”

  Billy left off kicking the snowbank and playfully pulled Helen to him.

  “And what about my idea of you, huh?” he said, hugging her, his voice teasing, but his regard serious.

  “What about it?” She laughed.

  “If I wasn’t around, would you change?”

  “Where would you be?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. My uncle—you know, the one who’s a pilot—he joined the RAF. Could be he’s dog-fighting some Stuka or Messerschmitt right this minute.”

  “But he’s an American.”

  “Eagle Squadron. It’s all American pilots.”

  Helen stared into Billy’s eyes.

  “What are you going to do?” she said fearfully.

  “Oh, nothing,” he said, giving her a little shake. “Guess the Brits don’t need any hardware store jockeys. I’m better use to them here making fighter plane engines.”

  Helen rested her cheek against the scratchy wool of his coat shoulder.

  “Better use to me, too.”

  He put his fingers under her chin and lifted her face. Slowly, eyes open, they kissed, then kissed again. Arms about each other’s waists, they resumed walking.

  “I wouldn’t change,” she said softly after half a block.

  “I’m not asking for a promise, Helen.”

  “And I’m not making one,” she said earnestly. “It’s just the truth. I wouldn’t change. No matter where you go.”

  June 1941

  By June, the March of Time newsreels proclaimed, there were 10,000 American volunteers in the RAF. The war news continued to go up and down, hope and discouragement trading places almost daily. The Allies, originally successful against the Italians in North Africa and Greece, were later bested in both places by the Germans. England was still under brutal bombardment—in Edward R. Murrow’s broadcasts from London you often heard the noise of bombs and the shouts of fire wardens in the background—but the English remained unbowed, and the RAF was regularly downing German aircraft and bombing the German homeland. The powerful and dangerous Bismarck had been sunk. On the other hand, the Nazis were marching into Russia with half a million horses, as well as thousands of planes and tanks and heavy guns. Sometimes, during newsreels, people in the audience cried, and sometimes they shouted angrily at the screen, especially when Hitler or Mussolini appeared.

  Amid the welter of bulletins and commentary, Helen found it difficult to weigh the ultimate import of events, or to discern in what direction the war was heading. Added to her confusion were the laments of her grandmother for all the German deaths, especially of civilians, and the careful positioning of her parents and other German-Americans in the neighborhood. Her father’s singing society had cancelled its annual concert and indefinitely suspended meetings. The front garden of the Dohrmanns sported little American flags beside their hydrangea bushes. The Smiths, whose great-grandfather had been Schmidt, had dropped out of Ursula’s seances, which they’d been used to attending every few months. The frequency of seances had been cut in any case, Ursula saying the spirit world was too much in turmoil to make visits from there as calming as in peacetime.

  “Some do not even know yet they are dead,” she confided to Emilie in Helen’s hearing one evening as the three sat in the living room, the older women mending and Helen reading. “They come to our circle confused, like drifting boats.”

  “How can that be?” Helen asked in spite of herself.

  Ursula considered her before answering, as if pondering whether someone who had disdained learning about spirit deserved explanation now.

  “When death comes sudden or violent,” she finally replied, “the person can be as if dreaming. He stands in a spinning fog, afraid to go forward, even though he may see light ahead.”

  “What happens to them?” Helen said.

  “Some awaken slowly to understand this life is done. Sometimes a higher spirit leads them. In our home circle, we have called such spirits to help the lost ones. It is good work, but it is tiring, and I cannot ask Mrs. Durkin and Mr. Grauer and Miss Simmons to do it too often.”

  Ursula paused, again seeming to consider whether to proceed.

  “You, Helen, younger and with your natural gift, could help. Just in this, not more. I do not let customers in the home circle.”

  Helen swallowed. She wanted to say that she couldn’t do what her grandmother was asking because she believed it would open a dam already straining. And she feared that what would come through would be not a measured flow, but a wild torrent that would wash away the normal life she’d been carefully building. What justification would not sound small and selfish? What equality was there between her wishing to count on flat-footed, ordinary days, and ghosts needing to be taught that they were dead? How could she say she was in her own struggle to find a place? How could she admit out loud that she didn’t want to risk losing the affection in Billy’s eyes, the touch of his hands?

  “Nanny,” Emilie said, stepping into the taut silence, “remember when you and the others helped my babies leave?”

  Ursula shifted her gaze to her daughter. She seemed annoyed by Emilie’s interruption, but the change of topic was too sensitive a one to dismiss.

  “Ja,” she said.

  “You were too little to remember,” Emilie said to Helen, “but when my pregnancies failed, your brothers’ spirits were confused and unhappy, like Nanny just described. The circle talked to them and told them not to be afraid. We imagined them f
loating up into the sky like beautiful soap bubbles. It was a great comfort to me to know they had found their way.”

  It was only the second time Helen had ever heard her mother talk about her miscarriages. Helen recalled them happening largely because she’d been sent both times to stay a few nights at Mrs. Durkin’s house so her mother could rest. Mrs. Durkin had told her that Emilie’s babies had gone back to heaven because they weren’t ready yet to come live on earth. Helen had wondered in what way tiny babies could be unready. She’d considered all that had to be done before she was ready to go anywhere—the finding of shoes, the brushing of teeth and hair, the matching of outerwear to the weather. None of that applied to the case of her puzzlingly fickle brothers, but when she returned home, the subdued manner of the three grown-ups informed her that questions would not be welcomed.

  Helen had waited, a usually trustworthy course, and soon enough they took up their normal ways of speaking and moving about the house, but she had never felt the time ripe to ask for more information on why the babies hadn’t been ready, and eventually, she forgot about it. It was only last year, when a neighbor lost a baby, that Emilie had talked briefly with Helen about her own miscarriages and how slow the sadness had been to lift.

  “Nanny helped me see that my babies were still part of my life and your father’s, and life in general, no matter how briefly they’d existed here,” Emilie had said then. “You see, she’d lost babies, too.”

  Though her grandmother had resumed her mending, Helen knew she was still waiting for her to respond to the suggestion that she join the seance circle. Ursula would let Emilie unwind her digression, but she wouldn’t be thrown off by it.

  “Ja,” Ursula said, “babies need help. Sometimes, too, there are spirits who know they should let go, but who cannot because they love too much this world or someone in it, or something they feel is left to do.”

  “Are you finding more of those since the war?” Emilie asked.

  Ursula sighed.

  “They worry, some of them, that their people here need them, or that if they go forward, ties to those people will break. Such spirits we must push a little, so they may see that we do not really lose each other.”

  “Nanny,” Helen began carefully, “I know all this is important, but I’m just not sure that I could … I don’t want any more …”

  “It’s not fair to put Helen on the spot,” Emilie said to her mother.

  Ursula looked from one to the other.

  “Zwei gegen einen. I am outnumbered.”

  “Maybe I could help at the séances,” Emilie offered. “I haven’t the gift, but I did take part for my babies, so I know how it’s done.”

  Ursula nodded concession, though it was clear she begrudged it.

  “Your mama told me about the picture in Life,” she said to Helen. “Has it happened again since that?”

  “No.”

  “This I am surprised to hear.” She raised her eyebrows. “You have more strength than I supposed.”

  “Well, I’m going to have a bath,” Emilie said, standing up and putting her sewing things into a lidded basket.

  Emilie obviously believed everything was safely settled, but Helen didn’t want to stay in the room alone with her grandmother, who suddenly felt like an adversary. Helen hadn’t asked her mother to keep her experience with the photograph a secret. But Nanny hadn’t said anything, so Helen had assumed she didn’t know. It was distressing to realize the old woman had stayed deliberately silent all these months, as if she’d been waiting for the best time to bring it up, a time at which it might serve her own aims.

  “I have a report to finish,” Helen said as soon as her mother had exited. She closed her book and rose from her chair.

  “So near the end of school?” Ursula said suspiciously.

  “The last one of the year!” the girl answered with calculated gaiety.

  She had just reached the doorway when Ursula muttered to herself. Her voice was low, but Helen caught the words distinctly.

  “Ja, I am outnumbered,” she said. “If you do not count the dead.”

  CHAPTER 17

  DECEMBER 1941

  On tiptoes near the top rung of a tall ladder, Helen reached above her head to fasten a strand of silver garland looping from the corners of the high school gymnasium to the center of its ceiling. The ladder wobbled.

  “Hey!” she called to the girl below who was supposed to be steadying it.

  “Huh?” Madeline Darby turned her gaze dreamily up at Helen. She’d been absorbed in watching a group of boys assemble a bandstand. A Victrola was playing the hit Take the A Train, and one of the boys had stopped working to dance extravagantly across the unfinished stage, evoking raucous complaints from his comrades.

  “Never mind them,” Helen scolded. “Hold the ladder still.”

  “Javohl,” Madeline said sarcastically. “But don’t take all day about it, would you?”

  A number of retorts sprang to Helen’s mind, but she didn’t utter any of them. It had been like this most of the school year, veiled and not-so-veiled rudeness. From Madeline and a few others. Not from everyone, not even from a majority of the students, but you never knew who might throw out a biting comment or when. In Civics, Jeff Keller had declared that Germans as a race were bloodthirsty and heartless, citing as examples not only the armies of the Kaiser and the Third Reich but also Bruno Hauptmann, who’d been convicted of murdering the Lindbergh baby several years ago. Not even a gangster would be so cruel, Jeff had said, and the teacher hadn’t contradicted him.

  Helen tried not to provide any cause for criticism. That meant holding her tongue when she would have liked to speak, pretending not to hear certain remarks. It meant she felt constrained from doing anything as public as running for Student Council or trying out for Color Guard.

  Helen knew from her grandmother’s stories that the situation wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it had been during the Great War, when it was illegal to teach German, or to speak it on the street or on the phone. Books about German history and literature were taken out of schools and libraries. In some places, German churches were burned down, German men forced to kneel and kiss the American flag. There’d been lynchings in Illinois, floggings in Texas, imprisonments in Georgia. It was having lived through all that that had made Ursula so disturbed by the passage of the Alien Registration Act last month, which meant she’d have to go to the post office to be photographed and fingerprinted.

  “Like the common criminal,” she’d said indignantly.

  “The government files fingerprints on upright people, too,” Emilie had said, trying to soothe her. “Policemen, civil servants … Even J. Edgar Hoover has been fingerprinted.”

  “I will obey the law,” Ursula said, unappeased, “but I will not believe it is fair or harmless.”

  She’d made Helen accompany her to the post office. Pretending not to know English, she wouldn’t deign to speak to the officials.

  The occasional barbs and snubs at school were blemishing Helen’s senior year, but no one could truly feel carefree this year. The start of school in September had coincided with the beginning of the German siege of Leningrad, now in its fourth month. News was scant and all bad—people freezing and starving, dying of simple illnesses in the cold and dark. The use of convoys had diminished the success of U-boats in the Atlantic, but the stealthy submarines were still making lethal strikes, including sinking two American destroyers that were escorting British supply ships. The Japanese, too, had launched a fleet of subs. The Americas seemed a huge island surrounded by bloodshed and misery.

  Madeline walked away when Helen was only halfway down the ladder, leaving her to drag the heavy thing to the custodian’s closet on her own.

  As Helen walked home, the bright afternoon lifted her spirits. It was warm enough to leave her coat unbuttoned. The snow of last week was melting. Drips glistened from tree branches, black against the azure sky.

  The shops on West Main Street were decked out for
Christmas. Helen walked by leisurely, thinking about what gifts she might get her parents and grandmother.

  She stopped in front of McCutcheon’s Gift Shop to consider an arrangement of cut-glass bowls and goblets. Sunlight was slanting into the window, and the glassware refracted it against the shelves lined with shiny blue and green foil paper. Helen squinted against the glare. It seemed, then, that she was looking down on a glimmering sea from a great height.

  The street sounds around her ebbed, replaced by a dull drone that became louder and louder, burgeoning into a roar. Helen turned around, expecting to find other pedestrians stunned by the awful noise and searching apprehensively for the arrival of whatever massive machine could be making it. But as soon as she looked away from the shop window, the sound stopped. She met only the familiar Saturday street busy with unfazed citizens and ordinary automobiles.

  Oh, Lord, Helen thought, it’s happened again. Though this was a new variation, a set of sensations inserted into normal surroundings like a joker slipped into a deck of cards. Her heart was glutted with foreboding. What could the innocuous vision of the sea and the deafening noise mean? Unlike the specific knowledge that had come from the Life photo, this experience resisted quick interpretation.

  Just because she couldn’t decipher the sea scene didn’t mean it had no significance. Was someone going to drown? It was December, for heaven’s sake. Who went swimming in New Jersey in December? Billy had talked about taking a life-saving course at the Y in February. Should she stop him? Would he listen? And what about the noise? That had been the frightening part. She’d had a quick sense of expectancy when she’d seen the sea, but the noise had felt like a dire threat. Maybe Billy or his father was going to have an accident with some machinery at the engine factory.